Lissandra's Passive, bringing the control back

Lissandra is one of lol's premier control mages, and I think that her kit matches incredibly well with both the ice mage and the control mage aspects of her character. Then you find out she has a mana passive, which is fine, but doesn't make a great deal of sense for a control mage.

While her passive does offer a free spell cast every so often and offers incentive to cc things with your spells by reducing the cool down of the passive for every enemy that you cc, it doesn't fit control mage very well, or ice mage for that matter. A few points that seperate this passive from a more fitting and thematically consistent passive are: it doesn't offer control, it doesn't fit freezing or other icy things, it does not ask you do control things more, or better. Her current passive instead asks that you be in a good position every X seconds to use a higher mana cost spell as soon as the cd on the passive is up; yet while the passive is on cool down it makes hitting as many things as possible with cc, even if that means hitting six minions is better than hitting an enemy champion and two minions (with W i.e.).

A more fitting ice/control mage passive, would incentivize having more moments, or stronger moments of control, while relating to ice... vaguely. Lets take a look at what makes the control mage strong so we know what we are trying to incentivize. Positioning allows a control mage to get in the right place to force things to happen, like flashes and high priority spells. Crowd control lets a control mage get in position, or keep enemies right where you want them. Range keeps a control mage from having to put themselves in a poor position and out of harms way longer. A good passive for a control mage betters one of these or multiples of these, hopefully fitting into the play pattern that character uses (in this case lissandra's play pattern).

Lets take a look at a passive that creates a stronger moment of control through range, that stays thematically consistent with ice. Every X seconds your next basic spell cast has increased range (flat or percentage or per spell basis). This fits with lissandra's the world will become ice theme, as you cover more area with your spells (theme fits rather loosely here, but well enough for an early idea), and it gives more control, by adding range to lissandra's spells every so often she becomes able to keep a greater distance, have a longer range gap closer/escape, longer range single target cc, larger aoe cc. In addition you aren't wasting a resource (like free mana) for holding onto your passive.

That passive is far from perfect though, it messes with spell range, which players learn and get ingrained pretty far, it's probably not good to mess with that (I mean we could, but the passive indicator would need to be more obvious). In addition to the fact that lissandra is already big on taking a big first strike, and is in a good place balance wise I don't think that she needs more power in that department, even though riot has been trying to keep the strengths and weaknesses of champions fairly separate (it's easier to balance, buff a strength, nerf a weakness keeps it pretty easy from what i gathered). Another thing is that the trigger for the passive may not fit well, a timer based passive gives a great moment of strength and a clear vulnerability window, but like what i said earlier, I think it fits just a little too well with what lissandra already does and would put her over the edge.

While exploring many avenues is important when thinking about complex things (like champions) for the sake of leaving the floor open I'll just iterate on the passive I have been. Lets say that range increase is really a great idea and fits super well; which passive trigger would fit best. The triggers that I know of would be: timer (with possible reductions), spell cast counter (her own spells or ambient, probably just hers) (possibly it could time out think yi passive but with spells), condition based (something has to happen before something else can there is a LOT of space here). Catch me there if I'm wrong rito, but those are the big ones for passives right? I think that while a spell counter could work, it leads to the same thing as the timer did, except that to activate the passive you have to burn through more spells, and potentially have to burn long cool down spells like R and E in poor situations to achieve that little extra range. Condition based... is a huge design space. What condition would work here?

Well this is a tough one, we could have her spells do a kind of extension after colliding with a unit, but that doesn't really add much, other than just a pure range boost, the idea with this particular passive is to give opportunistic range increase. A few passives I've listed here are totally available for criticism, with the caveat that I already know that range increases are... not good for clarity. (they murder it actually >_